The Organic Society

Abstract

George Eliot’s commitment to the ideal of a spiritually organic society is an important part of her thought. Though the concept of an organic society had its origin before the Romantic period, it is extremely prominent in Romantic social thought, particularly among the German Romantics,1 and it is very likely that George Eliot was influenced by Romantic formulations of it. Her organicist social views are most directly presented in her essays ‘The Natural History of German Life’ and ‘Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt’, the former being a very sympathetic review of the first two parts of Naturgeschichte des Volks by the German sociologist, W. H. Riehl, a writer clearly influenced by the social thought of the German Romantics.2